Lead Product Manager

Lead Product Manager

Location: Flexible. Key collaborators are based in NYC, Seattle, and Dallas, so extra points if you're in one of those markets.

Compensation: Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside

Department: Product

Reports to: CEO

About Rare Candy

Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the only community marketplace 100% dedicated to TCGs. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, data-rich collection tools, and expert-curated Instapacks to buy, sell, rip, and showcase Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 20x revenue growth this year alone, the business is profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining platform. We're a 25-person team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG-obsessed rock stars to join our team.

The Role

As our Lead Product Manager, you'll drive the roadmap and own product outcomes. You'll turn customer insight and data into clear priorities and specs, then partner with engineering and design to take work from concept through launch, measure results, and iterate.

You'll be our first PM, so you should be a startup-experienced rockstar who can establish and set the standard for the function. You'll own product craft end-to-end: research, specs, and the engineering handoff, working closely with our Head of Design. You'll partner with our CEO to refine product vision and strategy and then own day to day execution with your cross-functional partners.

You should be excited about moving fast, learning quickly, and having a tremendous impact on the business and our users.

This is a high-bar role, and we're willing to search for the right person. If you're a seasoned product manager who's energized by a hands-on founder, has strong product judgment, and genuinely loves trading cards, keep reading.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days: You'll start by immersing yourself in our data, getting to know the team, and talking to our users to understand how they're using our app. You own and ship a medium-sized feature plus a few small but important refinements end-to-end, with less hand-holding each week. You also help set up and organize our two-month roadmap. By day 30, the CEO trusts you to own things and ship them right.

First few months: You're running the full product-management function, including roadmap execution, specs, prioritization, and shipping cadence, so the day-to-day product engine hums without the CEO project-managing it. You've built a strong working rhythm with design and engineering. You're able to balance day to day execution with working on the next major bets we'll ship 3-6 months out.

By the end of year one , you've shipped a body of high-impact work that moved our guiding metrics: weekly active users and new activated users. You've built the lightweight product process a fast-shipping team needs without bureaucratizing it, and you've earned the trust and shown the judgment to be on a credible path toward Head of Product.

What You'll Do

• Own product management end-to-end: from customer research and data to problem framing, to spec, to testing, to engineering handoff and launch.
• Drive the roadmap: collaborate with our CEO and CTO on setting out a high-impact roadmap, then drive execution on it.
• Stay close to the customer and the numbers: fluent with both qualitative research and quantitative data. You tie every product decision to whether it moves active and new-user metrics.
• Partner with the CEO daily: you'll work closely framing up key decisions and strategy, and working through feedback. You own the day-to-day output and will work collaboratively with the founders on prioritization and long-term strategy & vision.
• Collaborate across the team: work constructively with engineering, design, and cross-functional partners. You bring high agency and low ego, empower your collaborators to do their best work, and make sure they get credit for it.
• Build the product muscle: establish just enough process to ship reliably and fast, and grow into the product leader of this company.

You Might Be a Fit If

• You've got 6 to 10 years of product management experience shipping high-quality consumer products, with a track record of high-impact work in high-velocity environments, ideally in an early-stage startup. We care far more about demonstrated ownership and impact than your exact years or titles.
• You have real product-management chops and an excellent taste for UX and design, and you have a strong intuitive sense of user needs and polished, delightful product.
• You're fluent with AI tools and use them to move faster through research, design, spec creation, and testing. You use AI tools to get faster early results across data, research, and user testing via quick prototypes, but you don't delegate your critical thinking to the tools.
• You're deeply customer-oriented and equally comfortable with data. You can conduct research, read a funnel, and balance customer needs against business needs.
• You operate with high agency and a bias to action. You take responsibility for your own growth and leverage, you move decisively, and you orient relentlessly toward impact that matters, not motion for its own sake.
• You're a high-trust, low-ego partner who's energized, not constrained, by working closely with a hands-on founder.
• You're a true trading-card and collectibles nerd. You collect, you play, or you've got real fluency in the hobby, and you light up talking about sets, pulls, and the meta.

Why Join Us Now

• Define the product of a category-defining collecting company, in partnership with a founder who's deep in the work with you.
• Be the first full-time product manager, with a clear path to Head of Product and the chance to shape how our product team is built.
• Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside.
• Full benefits: health, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and a wellness stipend.
• A monthly dogfooding budget to spend on cards, because we hire people who love this hobby.

How We Hire and How to Apply

The best signal is real work, so this process ends in a paid trial: a scoped, real-stakes engagement where we build together before either of us commits. Before that, we'll want to see and discuss the impact you've driven at past companies.

Apply through our Ashby posting and answer these:

1. Share two or three products you personally owned from problem framing through shipped impact. Include links where possible.
2. Send links or work samples that show your product thinking and judgment.
3. Share one spec, research synthesis, or handoff artifact that made engineering faster or clearer.
4. Take a quick look at Rare Candy and one or two relevant competitors. Where's the biggest product opportunity to improve versus the market?
5. Required: prove real trading-card fluency. What do you collect or play? What's your favorite era, set, card, or collector niche? And what's a sharp take you have on where the hobby is going?

Rare Candy is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate individuality, from Pikachu collectors to Planeswalker pros, and are committed to building an inclusive team.